It’s confirmed on the Twitter blog after being broken on Electropig (great scoop lads) and Mashable – very soon free SMS text service for Twitter will return – but only for Vodafone UK customers.
Many said that the loss of the free SMS service from Twitter was a blow for the service and there was the usual outraged moaning (I thought it made perfect sense – you can’t give stuff away forever) and Twitter went from strength to strength afterwards.
Anyway, let’s look at this another way – is this Vodafone UK’s way of fighting the iPhone? O2 has the iPhone, Orange are rumoured to be joining them (as well as getting the option for the 3G sim-enabled macbook when it comes out) and it seems to be a fairly tight agreement, so what do you do if you can’t have the iPhone? Go get the main channel of communication instead. I wonder if a phone network could insist on this as an exclusive – and make that the carrot they offer to customers?
I’d watch and see what phones Vodafone start to tout now becuase they’ll push phones that let you make the most of this – though I wonder if they will charge a small amount – £5 a month say – as an add-on for the unlimited Twitter option or if it will be free for everyone. If so, who the feck is scaling their network?
Be interesting to see how this plays out.
UPDATE: It’s a Vodafone exclusive right enough. According to Yashin19
devices tab in Twitter settings confirms SMS alerts are exclusive to Vodafone. Along with good coverage in Edinburgh it seems!
I think this could be a bit of a gamechanger – though the debate has already started (guess where).
2 responses to “Free SMS Twitter on your phone returns to the UK – for Vodafone users – is this their iPhone killer and is it exclusive? (yes it is)”
Although this is quite a clever move by Vodafone and a postive step by Twitter, I can’t see consumers signing up to the Vodafone service just because they can receive tweets.
If consumers don’t convert to Vodafone, I can see it only being a matter of time before other networks sign up to this service.
Adam: I’m about to move from O2 to Vodafone, almost entirely due to the Twitter deal. I doubt that many people will do so, but in a marketplace that seems to struggle for differentiation lately, this could be a good way of getting a particular type of user.
Your last sentence doesn’t make sense by the way – the other networks will only have serious motive to sign a deal with Twitter if they DO start losing customers. That’s why I’m voting with my wallet next month.
Re: the original post – my understanding of the Twitter blog post about this deal is that Vodafone will be charging Twitter text deliveries against the customer’s text message bundle. So if you have unlimited texts, no charge – but if you’re on a 500 texts a month package (for example), then you might use those all up quite quickly. Especially if you follow Stephen Fry 🙂